CAIDA, San Diego Supercomputer Center, University of California San Diego

The cooperative anarchy of the global Internet defies easy
characterization or measurement of its behavior. Fortunately, lack
of global understanding has not stalled the advancement of network
engineering technologies that enable and support Internet growth
- for the moment. Both Internet users and providers can benefit
from measurements that detect and isolate Internet problems, and
identify traffic bottlenecks. Yet it is neither practical nor
particularly effective to monitor and measure every single link.
Common sense supports the establishment of a measurement infrastructure
strategically designed to yield maximal Internet coverage
at reasonable cost.
However, while individual
ISPs monitor their own infrastructure and quality of service,
business and other practical concerns
often prevent sharing of such information.
We survey existing public and mission-specific Internet
measurement infrastructures, comparing them using a variety of
criteria. Community awareness of similar measurement activities
will hopefully facilitate opportunities for collaboration,
leveraging experiences and investment across groups.
Cataloguing these sources of Internet measurements also
provides operations researchers with places to seek
topology, workload, performance, and routing data
that can help them refine
metrics and methodologies for effective management of the
global Internet.